Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation

2 4 Interpretation
Heidegger’s conception of the people as ineluctably questionable
separates him from official National Socialist ideology. As always, he insists
that race and the body are not absolutes. They enter history only as part of the
earth: when the earth conflicts with the world, a people can come to belong to
its god (399)—but it is grotesque to try to ground history on blood and race
(493). Physical traits do not found a people. They are part of the given into
which a people is thrown, but the people’s leaders must find ways to project
possibilities on the basis of this thrownness, drawing the people beyond collective
navel-gazing and setting it back into beings (398). The leitmotif of
Heidegger’s critique of Nazism, then, is that it turns the people into a fixed, selfcentered
subject, instead of recognizing its potential as Dasein. A “total”
worldview typically overlooks its own concealed ground “(e.g. [the] essence of
the people)” (40). The Nazis reduce the people to “the communal, the racial,
the lower and underlying, the national, the enduring” (117). If a völkisch principle
is ever to play a role in German destiny, it will have to be handled by those
who have reached the “highest rank of be-ing” (42; cf. 24, 319, 479; see
Addendum 3).
This is not to say that Heidegger feels any nostalgia for the
Weimar Republic. Instead, he groups together all the political ideologies of his
time, claiming they all posit man “as what one already knows in its essence”
(25). For example, the “innermost essence of ‘liberalism’” is self-certainty, presumably
because the liberal insistence on individual rights presupposes a
settled conviction about what it means to be an individual subject (53, cf. 319).
When Nazism exalts the body over the mind and soul it merely becomes “biological
liberalism” (53), since it still presupposes that it knows what it means to
have a soul, a mind, and a body (Polt 1997). By the time he finishes the
Contributions in 1938, Heidegger has decided that the ideologies that are about
to clash in the looming war are all metaphysically the same.
A FTER THE C ONTRIBUTIONS:
C RITIQUE OF THE M ETAPHYSICS OF P OWER
The Contributions are followed by a series of other private
writings, including Besinnung (GA 66, 1938–1939, translated under the title
Mindfulness); “Die Überwindung der Metaphysik” (1938-1939), included in
Metaphysik und Nihilismus (GA 67); Die Geschichte des Seyns (GA 69,
1938–1940); Über den Anfang (GA 70, 1941); and a set of notebooks titled
Überlegungen (scheduled to be published as GA 94–96). These writings go farther
along the path begun in the Contributions, but place a new emphasis on